Bill Quateman “Bill Quateman”

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#112 in the Series) is the debut self-titled album by”Bill Quateman.”

In 1972 I head a song on WXRT called ‘Changing of the Guard.’ ‘XRT has always given a run down on what they had just played. Usually as a set. I loved the song and waited to hear who it was by. Well That’s when I first heard the name Bill Quateman.

So made my trek to Hegewish Records and bought his debut. Mind you I didn’t look at the song list.

Well somehow I got the album wrong. The song I heard was Steely Dan. But I screwed up what I was looking for and ended up with Quateman.

But I played the album anyway and it turned into one of my favorite albums of all time. I still love it to this day!!

I’m not sure how he pulled it off, but Quateman was able to get Elton John’s backing band to play on this release. Caleb Quaye and Davey Johnstone on guitar and Sid Simms on bass. He also grabbed one of the best drummers in Chicago, Tom Radtke.

The music was wonderful. Folk – Rock I guess you could say?

Some of the tracks that jumped out were, My Music, Only Love, Only The Bears are the Same, Too Many Mornings, What Are You Looking For,’ and ‘ Get It Right On Out There.’

Jump forward about 30 or so years. One night I was looking around on the internet and found Bill’s email address. It was also a Yahoo Messenger address, Well I saw he was online and we chatted for about 20 minutes. It was pretty cool. A few months later he did a show at Fitzgerald’s here in the Chicagoland area. I was able to get together with him and I told him the Steely Dan story. We both got a big kick out of it.

This is one of those albums that you can play over and over from start to finish. Check it out.